What makes this Vista article any different? The title provides a clue: it's as much about providing practical working solutions to resolve some of the commonly-quoted Vista annoyances as anything else. That in itself should give all Vista users a reason to read it. However it doesn't matter whether you use Vista or not, because this article does something that most of the others don't: it takes an objective and up-to-date look at the current state of Vista, with a range of facts, clear examples and informed opinions aimed squarely at debunking a lot of the myths and FUD we've been gagging on for the past year. So for those of you still considering whether to make the switch from XP, for those of you who want to abandon Vista and go back to XP, for those of you who used Vista a while ago and who are wondering whether it's worth using again now - this article puts things in perspective with the latest facts.

I'm in xp right now, but if someone is in vista, maybe you can verify this. I tried out vista, and with the full aero display, explorer.exe was using nearly 100mb more, than on windows classic(w2k look). Ironically, just disabling aero, but maintaining the theme didn't drop the memory usage nearly as much.

I don't quite understand your question, but one thing to keep in mind is that when Vista is using Aero it off loads the GUI to be processed by the graphics processor, thus freeing the CPU from having to deal with the GUI. If your graphics processor is up to snuff Vista should be more responsive with Aero enabled.

well my argument is(and I have an Nvidia 8500GT 512mb), aero uses an extra 100 mb of system ram, and on a 1gb system(which is double the requirements for vista) that's a significant punishment in system responsiveness. As I said before also I only noticed that memory freed when using the w2k look.

On my Vista x64 SP1 explorer.exe reports just under 7MB and dwm.exe has just under 19MB, going by Task Manager. My Resource Manager says the current working sets are 61MB for dwm.exe and 14MB for explorer.exe. 1GB of RAM is probably the least amount I'd want to have on a Vista system, and 2GB on an x64 one. Disabling Aero Glass will only slightly reduce the dwm.exe memory usage, at the expense of the more responsive and advanced GUI.

I usually run with aero-basic, since i have a cruddy integrated GPU on this laptop, and there is a slight hesitation when i try and minimize if the machine is being pushed (most people probably wouldnt even notice it, but i am kind of anal about that sort of thing.) Aero basic is pretty much just aero without the transparency.

Well, you didn't do the test case I mentioned, and it wasn't the dwm I was referring to, but explorer.exe. I don't have vista installed anymore, so I cannot verify it. Finally the difference was between classic(w2k style) and full aero glass(composite) desktop.